


this is the part where it hurts

by freefallvertigo



Category: UnREAL (TV)
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/F, allusion to rape and abuse but no actual details, suicide references (she doesn’t do it tho)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 00:32:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14008212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freefallvertigo/pseuds/freefallvertigo
Summary: Rachel is on a ledge and only Quinn can talk her down.





	this is the part where it hurts

**Author's Note:**

> this fic could potentially be very triggering for those with depression/suicidal ideation etc. read responsibly xx

Quinn had declined Rachel’s call.

She had been in the middle of a first - and presumably last - date when the phone had started to ring and Rachel’s name appeared on her screen. The date hadn’t been going well but Quinn wanted to avoid making matters worse by answering a work call before their main course had even arrived at the table. Plus, she was off the clock. Whatever Rachel wanted could wait until morning or she could damn well handle it herself.

She didn’t check her voicemail for another hour. Moments after turning down a less than tempting offer to return to her would-be suitor’s apartment, she climbed inside her car, which was still parked in the lot outside the restaurant. She removed her gloves, tossed them onto the passenger’s seat, and fished her phone out of her coat pocket. One voicemail from Rachel. If she had been calling with a work emergency, Quinn supposed others would have tried to contact her as well. Since it was only Rachel, Quinn was forced to conclude that this was about something else. She almost didn’t listen to the voicemail. Drama followed Rachel wherever she went. On air that was brilliant. Behind the scenes, however, that was a different story. For just one night, Quinn didn’t want to have to deal with it. She just wanted some peace.

Nonetheless, the urge to sate her curiosity soon overcame her reluctance at the prospect of being sucked in by another of Rachel’s schemes or self-made situations. She played the message. It went something like this:

”Hi, uh, hey. Quinn. It’s me, it’s Rachel,” Rachel sounded nervous. Drunk, too. “I’m sorry to call you so late, I just... I guess I didn’t know who else to call.”

Something was off. Rachel’s tone very closely resembled desperation and it made Quinn’s stomach knot. She’d heard it before and, coming from Rachel, it was definitely not a good sign. She kept listening.

“Don’t be mad but I kind of raided your office stash. I mean what does a girl have to do to get a drink around here anyway?” Rachel laughed dryly. Quinn heard what she presumed to be Rachel tipping a swig of vodka into her mouth and then a shaky exhale. “Um. I wanted to say, before I - I wanted to thank you, Quinn. Seriously. You gave me second and third and fourth chances and that goes way deeper than just the job, you know? I... I care about you. I know I’ve been a pretty shitty judge of character lately but I feel like I’m right about you. When I look at you, I actually see you. The real you. Everyone else, they’re all... Well. Anyway.”

Rachel was forcibly choking back sobs at this point. Quinn almost couldn’t bear to hear another second of it and it was only out of concern that she didn’t hang up.

”Just as long as you know that this - me - it’s not on you. Any of it. I really hope you can believe that someday,” The long pause that followed felt pregnant with the words Rachel was allowing to die before they formed on her tongue. “Goodbye, Quinn. I’m so sorry.”

The message ended there.

“Shit,” Quinn started the car and dialled Rachel back as she pulled out of the lot. The phone rang and rang and Rachel never picked up. “Answer your goddamn phone, Rachel.”

Quinn attempted to call Rachel several more times on her way to the mansion but to no avail. To describe her driving as reckless would have been an understatement. She flew past red lights and narrowly avoided at least two major collisions. All the while, every possible scenario was playing through her head, each of them more terrifying than the last. If it had been anybody else, she probably would have dismissed the message as the incoherent ramblings of a drunk. But this was Rachel and Quinn knew better. Somewhere between trying Rachel’s cell, she called an ambulance and stressed the urgency of the situation. Quinn cursed herself for prioritising a lousy date over Rachel. She knew better than that. At least, she thought she did. Would this one lapse in judgement prove to be the worst mistake of her life?

_I’m coming, Rachel. Just hold on._

Ten minutes later she arrived. The mansion looked different without the spotlights and cameras and lit candles everywhere. It seemed somehow haunting in that it loomed quietly over all that it was surrounded by; an enormous black shape indistinguishable from the night sky behind it. There wasn’t an ambulance in sight, nor was there a siren in earshot. Quinn was furious but not surprised and suddenly she found herself regretting every hoax call she’d ever made.

She started the search at her office. Sure enough, both bottles of vodka were missing, but so was Rachel. There was an imprint left behind on one of the sofa cushions which led Quinn to believe that Rachel hadn’t long since left the office. Next she searched the trucks. Rachel’s makeshift bed was empty. Quinn’s heart was in her throat and she thought she might choke on it if she didn’t find Rachel soon. Then, as she was headed across the patio in the direction of the production bay, she spotted a remarkably human-like shape on a lounger by the pool. She all but ran towards it.

As she grew nearer, the figure began to resemble Rachel more and more.

“Rachel!” _Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead._ “Rachel!”

The girl lifted her head up. It was Rachel. Relief flooded Quinn’s senses but it didn’t last very long when she was finally able to make out the scene before her. Rachel was hunched over a notepad upon which she had been scribbling frantically and beside her, on the floor, were the medication bottles all lined up in a row and the stolen bottles of vodka. One of the bottles was drained dry, the other down to two thirds of its original contents.

“Quinn?” Rachel turned her body and swung her legs down off the side of the lounger. “What are you-“

”Did you take anything?” Quinn asked. She crouched down in front of Rachel, studied her pupils, examined the pill bottles. They appeared to be full. “Answer me, Rachel, have you taken anything?”

”No. I...” Rachel regarded Quinn as though she weren’t entirely real, like she had just stepped out of her imagination and appeared before her as if by magic. “You came.”

”Jesus Christ, do you have any ide- where is your phone? I’ve been calling you nonstop,” Quinn didn’t know exactly what she was feeling but she was feeling a lot of it. “You can’t leave a message like that on my phone and then disappear off the face of the earth. I thought you were dead! Do you understand me?”

Now that Quinn was this close to Rachel she could see that the skin on her face was red and blotchy and her eyes were swollen. She had been crying. Quinn looked down at the notepad on her lap. Rachel tried to move it away but Quinn was faster, snatching it out of her hands and standing up to read it. It didn’t take long for her to realise what she was looking at. When she did, a razor sharp wire of hurt coiled itself tighter around her heart. Quinn forced herself to take a breath. She let the hand holding the notepad hang limp by her thigh.

“So,” Quinn shrugged. “What was the plan? OD here in the mansion so that when I arrived for work in the morning I’d be met with the paramedics rolling you out of here in a body bag? Or maybe you wanted me to be the one to find you, is that it? Was this going to be your final act of rebellion, forcing me to stumble over your cold corpse? That’s cruel even for you.”

Quinn knew that anger wasn’t the solution and she knew that it was wrong to see this as an act of betrayal, but she couldn’t help it. If she hadn’t listened to that voicemail, or if she hadn’t gotten to her when she had, Rachel may have been gone and Quinn would have been left all alone to deal with it.

“No,” Rachel shook her head. The tears had started again. “I told you. In the message I left for you. It’s not on you, Quinn. It’s me. Don’t you get it? It’s me.”

”Not on me? Seriously?” Quinn scoffed, incredulous beyond belief. “Did you spare a single thought to the consequences? To the people who would be left devastated in your wake?”

”Less people would be devastated by my absence than they are by what I do now. I _literally_ have a body count,” Rachel’s voice broke at several points. “Mary had a daughter. A little girl. And Coleman, he had-“

”I don’t care about them, Rachel. I’m talking about me!” Quinn shouted, sparing no though to how selfish she sounded because right then she believed she had every right to be. “If anything were to happen to you, who do you think it would hit the hardest? Your bitch of a mother? Your so-called friends who despise and envy you? It would be me. Okay? _Me_.”

Rachel nodded, eyes cast downward. “I know. And isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?” She croaked.

Despite how hard those words were for her to hear, Quinn’s posture softened. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Rachel - or anybody, for that matter - look so genuinely hopeless and defeated. Her eyes were dull and the bags under them seemed darker than usual. It looked like she hasn’t slept in a long while. She tugged at a thread in her jeans, unable to meet Quinn’s gaze for fear of breaking down under its weight.

“You know, I try not to let it bother me, Quinn,” Rachel squeezed her eyes shut for several seconds. When she opened them again she had regained some of her composure. “But I have nobody. The only person I could think to call was you. My boss. ‘Cause everybody else wants nothing to do with me and I can’t blame them. I’m a monster. It’s hilarious, actually, to think that someone like Mary had to die but I’m still here. I don’t deserve this. I deserve to... to rot.”

Quinn wanted so urgently to know the right words to say. Usually if anybody could diffuse the bomb that was Rachel, it was Quinn. Except this time the bomb had already exploded and now all Quinn had to work with was rubble and ruin. She sat down on the edge of the lounger beside Rachel, so close their shoulders pressed together, and gently wiped her tears away with the pad of her thumb. Rachel leaned into her touch so that Quinn’s palm cupped her face, and then she closed her eyes and just breathed. Quinn watched her wordlessly for a moment.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about something you said once,” She started, eventually breaking the silence. “To Britney. You remember? The almost-villain from Adam’s season? You told her that sometimes people go through shit in their childhood and their kid brain computes that as them being unloveable.”

Rachel was unreactive to the anecdote but Quinn could tell that she was listening.

“Well, Goldberg, I know I’m just your boss and what do I know but you aren’t unloveable,” Quinn insisted earnestly. “You’ve been through a trauma. Hell, haven’t we all? I know that the situation with me and my father wasn’t the same as what happened to you but you need to know that these thoughts you’re having, you’re not alone in them. You. Are not. Alone. I’m not going anywhere, do you hear me? I’ll never leave you.”

Rachel looked up through wet lashes at Quinn. “Why?”

”Why? What do you mean ‘why’?”

”Why do you even care, Quinn? I’m not the same person I was before. I’m not your dragon,” Rachel withdrew from Quinn’s touch so Quinn reclaimed her hand. “Everything I touch turns to shit. I’m done. You should be done with me, too.”

”I don’t need you to be a fucking dragon, Rachel, I just need you to be alive,” Quinn looked down at the notepad on her lap and sighed sadly. “I need you to know that these things you’re writing about yourself aren’t true. They aren’t. Nobody would be happier without you, that’s bullshit. Nobody wants this. Honestly, I don’t think _you_ want this.”

”It’s not about what I want, Quinn. We have done awful things. How is it that you can live with yourself after everything that’s happened?” 

“I suck it up.”

Rachel rolled her eyes and wiped away a tear with the hem of her sleeve. “Yeah. And the vodka helps too, right?”

Quinn pursed her lips and looked away. “Yes. The vodka helps. What would you have me do? What, are you trying to get me to join you? Here’s an idea, we can go up to the roof where Mary offed herself and hold hands as we plummet to our deaths. Super poetic. Does that sound like something you want? Would that solve everything?”

“I’m just trying to make you see,” Rachel was starting to sound frantic again. She grabbed Quinn’s face with both her hands and leaned in closer so that when she next spoke, their noses were millimetres apart. “We ruin each other. Over and over again, we lie and manipulate and hurt each other or we do it to others _for_ one another. This thing we have, it’s toxic, and it’s never going away. I’ve tried to walk away from you before, Quinn, but you’re like a drug and I can’t stand it! You need to run away from me. As far as possible.”

Rachel bit down on her bottom lip as soon as the last word left her mouth in order to stop it from trembling. Quinn’s vision has started to blur and she realised that she was crying now, too. She covered Rachel’s hands with her own.

”I can’t,” She confessed in a whisper. “I can’t run away from you.”

”Because you’re addicted.”

”Because I fucking love you,” Quinn countered, furious and heartbroken. “You aren’t unloveable because _I_ love you. All right? Now I want you to look at me and tell me that you understand what I’m trying to say. Do it.”

Rachel frowned. Her hands dropped to her sides and she leaned back slightly. She searched Quinn’s face, saw a truth she’d never acknowledged before written on it plain as day, and raised her eyebrows in disbelief. Suddenly, Rachel was at a loss for words. Quinn had said it to Rachel before but she’d never actually heard it until right then; never really believed it. After all, this was Quinn, the only person almost as volatile and exactly as deadly as she was. This was her boss. This was a woman who had been exposed to all of Rachel’s darkest, ugliest parts and surely - _surely_ \- nobody could love her after that. 

Except she did. 

“You love me,” Rachel reiterated.

Quinn smiled, though it was a wary one. It was the heavy smile of somebody who had been stripped bare of all their defences and now had only a delicate, frightening truth to offer. The words settled into the space between them and became thick with possibility. After several seconds of speechlessness, Rachel started to laugh. It was a broken kind of laugh, one that said ‘ _look at us, look at how fucked up we are_.’ At first, Quinn froze uncertainly. Not soon after though, she was laughing, too. It became uncontrollable; hysterical. Neither of them knew why they’d started or how to stop, but they knew it wasn’t really very funny at all. 

“You love me!” Rachel burst out between fits of laughter, which only caused the two of them to erupt even more. 

Quinn thought that she must have lost her mind. Her ribs were actually aching from how hard she was laughing. What was she doing? She was supposed to be helping Rachel, not encouraging her. Certainly not becoming her. When, eventually, the laughter died down, Rachel looked Quinn square in the eye as the smile slipped from both their faces. 

“I love you, too, Quinn,” She reciprocated quietly. Rachel put her arm around Quinn and pulled her in so that she was able to rest her head on her shoulder. “I always have.”

Quinn looped her own arm around Rachel’s waist and pressed a brief kiss to the top of her head. 

“Come here,” She tugged Rachel up gently and helped her settle comfortably against the back of the lounger once more, both of them still engaged in a clingy embrace as they lay back beside one another. “You’re staying with me tonight, Rachel. No more sleeping in a truck, no more sleeping _alone_. You’re staying with me.”

“I’d really like that,” Rachel murmured, voice muffled by the fabric of Quinn’s coat.

Quinn reached across her lap, retrieved the notepad, and tossed it into the pool where it landed with a satisfying splash. The water, which looked black at this time of night, devoured the book in seconds. As the words of the note bled from the paper into the chlorine, as did all evidence of Rachel’s losing battle with sickness bleed away, too. But she was glad for it, because tomorrow she’d stand up and fight again. 

Only this time, she wouldn’t be alone.


End file.
